Articulating dissent: protest and the public sphere

Abstract

Articulating Dissent analyses the new communicative strategies of coalition protest movements and how these impact on a mainstream media unaccustomed to fractured articulations of dissent.

Pollyanna Ruiz shows how new coalitions such as Occupy, anti-war movements and anti-cuts groups, as well as older movements such as the anti-globalisation and Women's movement, are dismissed in mainstream politics and the media for not communicating ‘unified positions’. She argues that it is in the nature of these modern protest movements that they represent very different protest traditions, such as those dedicated to non-violent direct action and those who advocate more confrontational forms of intervention.

Articulating Dissent investigates the ways in which this diversity, so inherent in coalition protest, effects the movement of ideas from the political margins to the mainstream. In doing so this book offers an insightful and original analysis of the protest coalition as a developing political form.